Spark, Bigdata, NoSQL, Hadoop are some of the most using and top in charts technologies that we frequently use in Knoldus, when these terms used than one thing comes into picture is ‘Huge Data, millions/billions of records’ Knoldus developers use these terms frequently, managing (and managing means here- storing data, rectifying data, normalizing it, cleaning it and much more) such amount of data is really not at all an easy task.

But user do no understand what they are talking about they just need to know the real essence of whole matter/data/story/facts. From here the term ‘visualization’ comes into picture, so Data Visualization/Intelligence is as important & vast as handling it.

Data visualization brings Business Intelligence Tools for accomplishing visualization goals and the market of BI tools is really huge, there are number of tools with different features, pricing, capabilities etc., if we start comparing them than there is no limit but there are some major Tools that do everything for you and your selection in search of best BI tool is totally based on your business requirements. Somehow as our title appended Tableau so we will talk about it here.

Tableau is groundbreaking data visualization software created by Tableau Software. Tableau connects easily to nearly any data source, be it corporate Data Warehouse, Microsoft Excel or web-based data. Tableau allows for instantaneous insight by transforming data into visually appealing, interactive visualizations called dashboards. This process takes only seconds or minutes rather than months or years, and is achieved through the use of an easy to use drag-and-drop interface.

Business Intelligence Software

Data Visualization Software

Data Analyzing Tool and much more.

Flavors of Tableau: Tableau is really huge, so they divided it into four flavors as per users needs.

Tableau Desktop

Tableau Server

Tableau Reader

Tableau Public

Tableau Desktop:All your development is done here. From creating reports, charts, formatting them, putting them together as a dashboard all the work is done on Tableau Desktop. Tableau Desktop comes in three editions: Public, Personal, and Professional. All of them allow you to save your workbook to the Tableau Public platform. Tableau Desktop (Public Edition) is limited to 15,000,000 rows of data per workbook and ten gigabytes (10 GB) of storage space for your workbooks (aka. vizzes).

Tableau Server: The dashboards you create are shared with other users using Tableau Server. When you upload(publish) a Dashboard to Tableau Server from Tableau Desktop, other users can access those Dashboards by logging on Tableau Server. Share everyone with a web browser. Tableau Server is highly secured for visualizing data. The Price of Tableau Server depend upon core licensing. Log in credentials are required. Users can be restricted.

Tableau Reader: is a free desktop application that you can use to open, view and interact with visualizations that have already been created in Tableau Desktop. … When they are done, they save it as a Tableau Packaged Workbook, or “.twbx” file. They share that file with you. Want to know when to use Tableau Reader: more

Tableau Public : It runs on cloud, Tableau Public is a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data visualizations to the web. Visualizations that have been published to Tableau Public (“vizzes”) can be embedded into web-pages and blogs, they can be shared via social media or email, and they can be made available for download to other users. Visualizations are created in the accompanying app Tableau Desktop Public Edition (or another Edition of Tableau Desktop) – no programming skills are required. Be sure to look at the gallery to see some of the visualizations people in the community have been creating. For more FAQs read here.

Tableau desktop work is shared through tableau server & online. Although there are limited desktop capabilities available in server/online version, Tableau is planning to provide full desktop authoring capabilities in coming years for server/online users!